Prototyping Assignment #1

The purpose of this assignment is to get you thinking critically about how to measure a health-related behavior of interest to you and brainstorming about how that measure might be converted to a smartwatch as a microinteraction survey and possibly used for a class experiment.

• Based on our class discussions of EMA and uEMA, make a list of the questions you think need to be answered to demonstrate the feasibility and utility of the extensions to the techniques we have discussed. If we are to convince people that uEMA can replace or augment traditional measurement, what do we need to prove? Write down potential hypotheses that you think should be explored.
• Pick a health-related behavior (or state) that (1) you think is important to measure in the field, either to improve health research or to create more effective health interventions that you can find in one of the NIH toolkits for behavior measurement, and (2) that you think can be used to explore one or more of the hypotheses that you identified. If you are uncertain about whether your behavior is a good choice, please run the idea by Prof. Intille. It should be a behavior or state that we might want to measure repeatedly. You may use the same construct you picked for Assignment 1 or Assignment 2 as long as you can find measurement tools for that behavior in one or more of the toolkits, or a new construct.
• Conduct (or extend, if you picked this behavior for Assignment 1) a thorough literature search on the measurement of this behavior, just as you did for the other assignments. Look at traditional and emerging instruments. Make sure you understand what experts in the field will expect to see with regards to utility, feasbility and validity when a new tool is proposed. Make a list of all the research articles you have found and put the articles into the class Endnote library using the paper documentation strategy.
• Based on our class discussion, develop a specific suggestion for how you will use the Android Wear smartwatch system to gather data on the behavior. Using the Android Wear Moto 360 template provided, design all components of the actual survey and the associated phone application. Do some paper prototyping (as discussed in the Rettig article and in class) with at least two different friends or and revise your ideas as necessary.
• Write and turn in a document that summarizes your question, hypothesis, and proposed system to test that hypothesis. On approximately 1-2 pages (11 point font, single spaced, 1 inch margins), include:
  • A title, your name, email, department, and year in school.
  • A few sentences on your question and why it is important to answer.
  • A few sentences (back up) about why your construct is a good one to use to explore that question..
  • A few sentences on your hypothesis and what the impact of knowing the answer would be on measurement (of your construct, or behavioral measurement more generally)
  • A description of the experiment you propose to answer the hypotheses, and a description of the new measure you would need to create to do so.
  • One or more additional pages, the references (included by Endnote, using the class reference format).
• On any number of additional pages, include scans of your final paper prototype for the measurement tool. By looking at these scans, it should be possible to not only understand exactly how the technology will work, but also (with appropriate cut-outs) actually run a paper prototyping session.

Please be prepared to discuss your experiment and design ideas in class. Please bring all your paper prototyping parts and be prepared to use them.

In addition to bringing your paper prototype parts, bring a hardcopy of your scans and write-up to class, and send an email of both parts of the assignment to ...@neu.edu. Name the file in this format: [your last name].paperproto1.pdf.